Green Taxi

I apologize for a lack of blog posts recently, but I have been quite busy traveling. I also have some news to announce.

As of two days ago, I am now the General Manager of the Tokyo Apache, the Tokyo basketball team in Japan’s professional basketball league. Evolution, the company I work for, bought the team as this press release explains. We are just at the beginning of the entire process, but I am really looking forward to it all.

I will probably be posting on here a lot less, unfortunately, but I promise to keep everyone updated along the way. I will be spending more time in Japan (if that is possible) and potentially be moving there, so there could be plenty of interesting stories to come.

Wish me luck!

Los Angeles gets more than 25% of it’s power from Arizona. Especially during the summer months.

Is a boycott of Arizona’s “turqoise jewelery and bolo ties” really worth it? Has Mayor Villaraigosa really thought this one through?

I use SponsoredTweets and think it is a great way to earn additional personal or business income through social media. I also think it is a great and cheap advertising channel as a media buyer.

However, Twitter advertising is still in its early stages. There are lessons to be learned on what are effective ads on Twitter.

Recently, I was approached by an advertiser through SponsoredTweets. They provided some pre-defined text for me to Tweet out in exchange for payment. I accepted it and the system tweeted it for me.

A couple of days later, I received a message that the tweet would need to be tried again because it did not receive enough clicks. Sponsored Tweets makes sure that a strong ratio of views/clicks exists to provide a solid service to their media buyers, which I completely respect.

However, Sponsored Tweets requires that you change the text of your original tweet, since the way you put it obviously did not work the first time. So, I changed the text around from the ad copy that the advertiser provided to something that sounded like it came from me and submitted it. Incredibly, the advertiser responded that the copy must match what they provided.

Obviously they did not entirely understand that Sponsored Tweets forces the user to change the text. But, more importantly, they do not understand the purpose behind that.

The first ad copy did not work for a reason. The advertiser wrote the copy. I can tell you from experience that all of the ads I have written have done better by far in terms of clicks received.

Anyway, I added a period to satisfy Sponsored Tweets and the tweet went out again. Sure enough, it was returned as it did not receive enough clicks. And sure enough, the advertiser still wanted me to run that same copy for the third and final time. I will not even try to run an advertisement for that sponsor again.

The smartest Twitter advertisers allow the user to write their own ad copy. If you want their followers to click through to your site, you want it to sounds like it is coming from the user, not some copywriter on Madison Ave.

From the NewOrleans.com dedicated gulf spill news page on the Gulf Oil Spill comes estimates for the total amount of oil leaked into the gulf. The widget is actually off a PBS site. Either way, the numbers and uncertainty is staggering.

Just look at the difference between what the NOAA estimates versus BP’s worst case scenario estimate. Talk about a large margin of error.